‘Justified,’ Season 4, Episode 1, ‘Hole in the Wall’: TV Recap

From left, Timothy Olyphant as Raylan Givens, Terry Dale Parks as Henry, and Patton Oswalt as Bob Sweeney in the fourth season premiere of “Justified.”

“Justified” is back for a fourth season of mordant wit, reluctant gunplay and stretching the boundaries of a U.S. marshal’s official duties. The season opener starts with a flashback to Jan. 21, 1983, as a husband in a suburban cul de sac bickers with his unseen wife about taking down the Christmas decorations. We hear a thud, and there on the pavement is a guy tangled in an extremely ineffective parachute, surrounded by a canvas bag and what looks like cocaine.

Thirty years later, Deputy U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens gets a call from Sharon Emmons, a bail bondswoman he met—in the biblical sense—at a conference in Miami. She’s looking for some off-the-books help tracking down a fugitive, Jody Adair, who skipped bail on a double homicide in Tennessee—he has an ex-wife in Lexington, Ky. Raylan accepts her offer of $3,000 to find him. He tells his colleague Rachel that he’s “got a thing” and heads out.

It doesn’t take long for Raylan to spot Mr. Adair, trying unsuccessfully to talk his way into his ex’s house. Before long, Jody is back in his car with the remnants of his side window on his lap as he and Raylan point guns at each other. Jody figures Raylan, being on the side of the good guys, isn’t going to shoot him, and Raylan allows that that’s right—instead he shoots the steering column, the airbag goes pow! and Jody’s soon on the ground and cuffed.

We see a very nice pocketwatch in a man’s hand, and that hand turns out to belong to Boyd Crowder, Harlan County crime lord and Raylan’s old friend/nemesis. So this is gonna be good. Boyd is interrogating a squirrelly bearded guy named Hiram about why Hiram hasn’t been selling much OxyContin lately. Hiram says he and many of their former customers have been saved at a new tent church, Last Chance Holiness, run by a Preacher Billy. (We meet Billy toward the end of the episode—he’s a charismatic young man running the standard playbook of snake-handling, laying on hands, etc.)

Boyd, reaching back to his own brief sojourn as a preacher, warms to the theological debate, citing the psalm about God making wine to gladden the hearts of man—“And what are goods but just modern-day wine, albeit in pill form?” Hiram’s not having it, but the huge explosion outside gets his full attention. That’s from Boyd’s other previous experience, in coal-mining detonations (and less-legal ones). Hiram, “saved or not,” has until tomorrow night to get Boyd his $10,000, “or the next firecracker’s gonna go off in here.”

We find a teen boy and girl—the girl quickly established as the brains of the operation, which isn’t saying much—smashing up a wall in an empty house. The boy wants to sell some of the copper wires, but the girl is focused on a canvas something-or-other hidden inside the wall. Cop lights flash outside and the kids run, outpacing the investigating officer, played by the comedian and character actor Patton Oswalt.

As an increasingly exasperated Raylan drives with the talkative Jody to take him in, he gets a call from Oswalt, who does his best Basil Exposition impression as he explains that he’s “Bob—Constable Bob Sweeney down in Harlan, yeah.” Turns out the house belongs to Raylan’s miscreant daddy, Arlo; Raylan had hired Bob to watch the place while Arlo’s in prison. (You know, for shooting a cop he mistook for Raylan, at the end of season three.) Raylan says he’ll come down. Meanwhile, he’s had enough of Jody’s lip and sticks him in the trunk.

Bob shows Raylan the damage at Arlo’s and brags that if he’d caught the wire-strippers, “I’d’a opened a Costco-size can o’ whipass on ’em.” But he later complains that people see him as a joke—Kentucky constables, it seems, are licensed but poorly paid and have to buy all their own equipment. Those flashing lights are mounted on an AMC Gremlin, hilariously. Raylan finds the canvas thing in the wall—a diplomatic pouch, containing only an early-’80s driver’s license for one Waldo Truth. The break-in kids watch through binoculars as Raylan tells still-trunk-bound Jody he has one more thing to do.

At a hardware store, where the proprietor tells an uninterested Raylan he’s concerned about Arlo’s mental state, the break-in girl spills some screws in the aisle and then asks Raylan if he “wants one.” Then she lifts her shirt and asks Raylan to assess what he sees—“I’m a late bloomer. Didn’t get ’em ’til just last year.” “Patience is a virtue,” Raylan replies. He heads out the front and she heads out the back, flashing the proprietor for good measure. Raylan comes back and asks where she went, because his car is gone.

Over at Boyd’s roadhouse HQ, a long-haired stranger asks for Boyd, whose employees play dumb. The stranger uses his military-police training to suss out that Boyd is in the back and goes on in, tripping cousin Johnny and leading Boyd’s lover/consigliere, Ava, to grab her shotgun in pursuit. In the back room, Boyd and the stranger are hugging in delight—it’s Colton Rhodes, who was an MP in Kuwait while Boyd was a serviceman/troublemaker there.

Raylan enlists Bob to help him get his car back. Bob demonstrates some dubious knife skills and talks about his “go bag,” which includes an AK-47 and some other stuff. As Chekhov observed, if a Kentucky constable mentions the AK in his go bag in the first episode, it’s guaranteed to go off by the end of the season. Bob also remarks casually that the thieves are probably taking the car off to be crushed for 500 bucks, which ups Raylan’s intensity as “I got s— in the car I don’t want to get crushed”—namely Jody.

At the junkyard, Raylan’s car is intact, but the trunk is empty. As the manager complains that he doesn’t have to answer Raylan’s questions, Raylan interrupts by punching him in the face. He wants to know where the kids are. We see they’re watching from the office, along with Jody, who asks if they’re ready to kill Raylan if it comes to that. Jody gets the kids to cut his handcuff chain so he can settle the question, but the girl is still holding the gun when Raylan comes in. The ensuing standoff is a hoot (Raylan as Jody holds the girl at gunpoint: “I suppose I should care, her age and all, but she did steal my car”) and ends with Bob stabbing her in the foot (aiming for Jody). As the room quiets down, Raylan asks for the truth about Arlo’s house and the pouch, though we don’t hear him get it.

Boyd enlists Colton’s assistance with the struggling criminal enterprise of Harlan, and off they go to visit Hiram, who reveals where he hid Boyd’s money just before a lit fuse reaches the dynamite in his lap. With that settled, Boyd tells Colt to “take care of him,” whereupon Colt shoots Hiram in the head. Boyd, shocked, says he’d only meant Colt should untie him. Oops. “Well, I guess I’ll have to be more careful with my words,” Boyd says.

A little earlier, Raylan visited Arlo in prison, where Arlo played dumb about the bag but let slip that he knew it was in the wall, which Raylan hadn’t told him. In the final scene, a fellow con who’d seen Raylan leaving with the bag comes to Arlo’s cell to say the bag could be worth something—he’ll make some calls to find out how much. Arlo asks the guy to get him a book from his library cart, and while his back is turned, he slashes his throat with a shiv. “Why? Why?” the dying guy gurgles. We want to know, too!

So the key mystery of the season is established: how that bag connects to Arlo and to that unfortunate parachutist, and why it’s worth so much. Looking forward to getting back some of the characters missing from the opener, like Raylan’s boss, Art, his sharpshooter colleague, Tim, and the nine-lived Dixie Mafia sleaze Wynn Duffy. Oh, and Raylan’s still expecting a baby with his absent estranged love, Winona. Big doin’s in Kentucky—hope you’ll stick around.